Party Branding in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective

• In Event: Global Insights on Political Parties

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic assessment of party brands in Europe, bridging the literature on party brands, party crisis and party-civil society interactions. We ask: to what extent, in what ways, and with what consequences do parties move away from traditional brands? We propose the names of political parties as a standardised comparative indicator of their branding strategies. Empirically, we focus on a combination of party-level and individual-level data. At the party level, we provide the first content-based analysis of party names in 30 European democracies between 2000-2020, distinguishing between organisational and programmatic references, such as the inclusion of the label 'party', the adaptation of movements or non-ideological names. At the individual level, we focus on the consequences of the reform of existing brands and the emergence of new ones. The results are based on two conjoint experiments conducted as part of a representative mass survey in Austria, Italy and Hungary. At the party level, we find an increasing trend towards non-party labels and non-ideological references. In contrast, the adoption of movement references develops in waves. The parties most likely to adopt non-traditional labels are challengers and ideologically right-wing parties. At the individual level, we find a penalty for changing party brands in the electoral appeal of existing parties. For the brand of new parties, we find differential responses to non-traditional brands, with part of the electorate punishing and others rewarding such brands. Overall, we argue that the rise of non-traditional brands reflects parties' response to crisis conditions.

Authors

• Endre Borbáth, Heidelberg

• Swen Hutter, Freie Universität Berlin & WZB Berlin Social Science Center